Black Hat USA Conference 2015 Main Event Starts Today

For the last two decades, hackers have been gathering in Las Vegas every year to demonstrate how they can take control of computers. Black Hat USA Conference 2015 is a six day event which began with four days of intense Trainings for security researchers of all levels (August 1-4) and is followed by the two day main event.

It is expected that more than 10,000 computer security researchers, professionals and government workers will attend the Black Hat USA Conference 2015. The conference will be featuring 290 sessions, which will describe network security flaws and how to guard against them.

This time researchers will demonstrate how they took a nuclear plant offline, how they hacked a chemical production facility, how they took over a TrackingPoint Sniper and wirelessly controlling cars from afar.

A Twitter engineer who used to work for the NSA is planning to reveal at the Black Hat USA Conference 2015 how he hacked Jeep Cherokee remotely from a laptop. An executive of a mobile security company is also planning to demonstrate how he and his friend hacked a Tesla.

Steve Wylie, Black Hat General Manager said:

“For security officials, this represents a scary new world. It’s just one example of threats to our modern-day society, and there’s more coming.”

The concerns regarding the Internet of Things (IoT) are not new, for the past many years, researchers have been saying that IoT poses a serious threat. Black Hat Conference 2015 will be featuring several workshops that and we can hope that it will be taken seriously.

Chris Poulin, IBM X-Force’s Research Strategist said:

“It’s an unfortunate circumstance that researchers have to go all the way to proof of concept to get IoT manufactures to understand the full extent of the consequences.”

As soon as the Black Hat USA Conference 2015 ends, DEF CON a more hacker-oriented conference will be held at the Bally’s hotels in Paris starting from August 6th. Last year more than 16,000 people attended DEF CON.